In this story, everyone's motives sound the same: all the participants believe they are benefiting humanity. Scientologists genuinely believe their secrets can save the world, but that they must be doled out only to those who have proven ready to receive them. Followers hold fiercely to the notion that their revered, secret texts must never be disseminated, save to the rigorously initiated, who pay tens of thousands of dollars to study them. Critics insist the religion is a scam that seeks to take over the minds of its adherents and bilk them of huge sums of money by selling utter nonsense; they feel that exposing these truths - and the secret texts - to the eyes of the Usenet-reading public is protecting that public from exploitation.

Whatever the motives, when computers are seized because they contain allegedly purloined intellectual property, messages are intercepted as they traverse the network, or the security of anonymous remailers is pierced by police, the days of the Internet as a cozy, private, intellectual cocktail party are over. Welcome to real politics.

We hold these truths

Alt.religion.scientology was never a quiet newsgroup. It was created on July 17, 1991, by Scott Goehring, who says he started the newsgroup half as a joke and half "because I felt Usenet needed a place to disseminate the truth about this half-assed religion." He forged the signature miscaviage@flag.sea.org onto the message used to create the group - a misspelling for church leader David Miscavige (flag and sea refer to Scientology branches, known as orgs).

From the start, the group attracted both skeptics and believers. While never coming close to agreement, the rivals managed to co-exist in the sort of tense balance the Net seems to specialize in. They even hammered out a more or less stable agreement to have multiple FAQs - rather than the standard single list of frequently asked questions - to introduce newcomers to both sides. While each side has criticized the other's writings, there have been no serious attempts to interfere with the dual FAQs. There has even been a certain tolerance for a particularly vehement Dutch poster who has declared most of the newsgroup's participants to be Suppressive Persons (SPs), the Scientology equivalent of excommunicates. He calls himself Ron's Inspector and believes he's telepathically in touch with Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986.

Hubbard was a pulp-fiction writer by trade. His published books, monographs, internal-policy documents, and taped lectures form what the church calls its sacred scriptures. The more advanced materials are closely guarded: Hubbard claimed that exposure to the secrets of an Operating Thetan, as the church refers to its acolytes, could harm, even kill, the partially initiated. The church's Net-related legal actions have all focussed on protecting the scriptures from disclosure.

These recent raids and suits have come after a long period of increasing verbal violence. One of the first steps toward open warfare was the emergence, in about 1990, of a group that wanted to separate the church and its scriptures. Calling itself the Free Zone, this group consists of people who have left the church but still want to practice its teachings - use the tech, as Free Zoners say. Ex Scientologist Homer Smith is one of these (ex meaning "expanded," not "former" Scientologist, says Smith). Wanting to encourage serious discussion of the tech away from the noisy brawl next door in alt.religion.scientology, Smith set up a second newsgroup, alt.clearing.technology, for this purpose. Even then, a church critic nearly got there first. Chris Schafmeister, a graduate student in biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, perpetrated a Usenet prank: in some older Internet guides, you'll read that alt.clearing.technology is for discussing acne cures.

Schafmeister was one of the first strident critics to join the discussion of Scientology on the Net, inspired by fliers on the walls of the UC San Francisco medical school. He was, he says, "really, really upset" at the way these posters targeted the sick, the sad, and the bereaved to get them into US$60 Scientology courses. Accordingly, he took to spending his study breaks arguing against the organization on Usenet. Schafmeister was the first to find in 1994 that the church had more than a passing interest in the discussions taking place in
alt.religion.scientology.